Abstract
IN Dominion Bulletien, No. 15, Mr. W. R. B. Oliver has summed up the available information concerning that remarkable group of flightless birds, the moas, some of great size, that formerly inhabited New Zealand and parts of Australia, but have all vanished, being only known to us through their remains. It appears that the birds, unable to fly, were liable to get engulfed in bogs, in which marshes their bones have been preserved, often in surprising numbers. It is to such remains that we owe our knowledge, though the birds must have survived up to comparatively recent times, because Maori camp sites have yielded charred and broken bones. Mr. Oliver sums up the reasons for the disappearance of what was once a considerable population, embracing many species of these specialized birds, in these words : "Man has been a great exterminator of species in all parts of the world ; and so it seems with great probability that in New Zealand man contributed most to the disappearance of the moa. . . . We know by numerous finds that man killed the moa for food and collected its eggs for the same purpose and for making utensils for water. . . . The fact that the moa disappeared when man arrived points very strongly to these events being related, so whatever the causes for the decrease of the moa population during the Pleistocene period its final extioetion was due to man."
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Flightless Birds of New Zealand. Nature 164, 1077–1078 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/1641077d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1641077d0